Specifying the Question

If anyone needs reminding of the distance traveled in Europe over the last half century, few anecdotes make the point more pointedly or amusingly than a textbook from early 20th century Germany that confronted young students living there and then, with the following mathematical story problem: ‘A machine gun mows down an enemy reconnaissance unit. Of a total of 250 shots, 20 hit the enemy soldiers. Express this figure in percentages’ (Ref. Reference Waite3, p. 156).

It is, of course, inconceivable that such attitudes would be on display anywhere on the continent today. Manifestly, this is no longer our grandfather’s Europe, and that can be seen as clearly in the absence of war as it can in the absence of the attitudes that are requisite to war.

On the other hand, to even pose the question of whether Europe has solved the problem of war can seem equally ludicrous, at least if we take the query quite literally. Wars rage in many parts of the world at this very moment. European soldiers fight in some of them. And the European continent even hosted its own nasty wars as recently as the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s. One might therefore legitimately argue that it’s ridiculous even to ask whether Europe has solved the problem of war.

But if the question is specified more precisely, it prompts an interesting analysis of potentially profound significance. Of course Europe has not solved the problem of war globally. It never set out to. However, if we mean by ‘Europe’ the institutions that have evolved into the contemporary European Union, along with the process of integration that has yielded these, the question becomes more relevant, as there was a clear aspiration from the beginning to end war within those boundaries. Thus, reformulated more precisely, we may derive a very intriguing question: has the European experiment in supranational integration eliminated war within its borders?

In fact, war has been entirely absent within the European polity (originally three parallel communities of six countries, then an enlarged European Community, and now a further enlarged European Union, comprising 27 member-states) over a period of six decades now. This simple fact represents something fairly amazing indeed. So it is that when commentators refer to Europe’s ‘Long Peace’ of our time, they’re justified in doing so, even though 60 years is not a terribly lengthy period by historical, let alone biological or geological, standards. Nevertheless, a remarkable thing has occurred, to the extent that these 60-plus years represent the longest continuous period of peace in the history of the European system of states. Moreover, it’s fair to say that Western Europeans have never even gotten close to such armed conflict with each other at any point since 1945. And, looking ahead, it also seems clear that war is nowhere near the horizon as even a remotely likely solution to any interstate conflicts bubbling within Europe today, of which there are none that are particularly grave, anyhow. Thus, from any reasonably historically-informed perspective, we should be clear – this is a stunning development.

But how did it happen? Positing this outcome as a product of the European experiment is no random formulation. There is a very definite relationship of at least a notional kind here, going directly back to the initial motivating logic of the European integration process. Given that most of the tangible developments along the way have been economic in nature – ranging from a coal and steel community, to a common market, to a single currency – it’s sometimes easy to miss the fact that, from the beginning, the point of that process has been fundamentally political. When Schuman announced the first integrative step in his Declaration,Reference Schuman¹ he proclaimed in a famous turn of speech that the goal for a devastated Europe was ‘to make war not only unthinkable, but materially impossible’.

Did Schuman achieve his goal? That’s really what the more specified version of this study’s title question is asking.

As noted, war between Europeans is in fact largely unthinkable today, though it’s a bit of a stretch to call it literally impossible in a material sense. But even if Europe got most of the way to Schuman’s goal, it is completely unclear – because of the epistemological correlation/causation problem – whether it was his process that was responsible for the achievement. In this regard, scholars are sometimes condemned to labor in very difficult vineyards indeed, when it comes to disaggregating causal effects embedded in the phenomena we observe. Analysts of international relations have little option but to take the empirical cards that history deals them and do the best they can with the data it provides.

As it turns out, in the case of this particular question, these are excellent cards for the real people of Europe, but lousy ones from the analytical perspective of seeking to explain the good news there. One can hardly think of another effect that is as massively over-determined as the Long Peace in Europe. There are at least a dozen causal factors – plus Schuman’s, and another related to his – which all likely pushed the continent simultaneously in a peaceful direction following the Second World War – and many of which might, hypothetically, have even been sufficient alone to bring peace to Europe. In short, the combination of these factors, it seems clear, rendered Europe’s happy fate nearly inevitable.

Explaining the Long Peace in Europe

What are these factors that partially or fully explain Europe’s radical change in behavior after 1945?

To begin with, there is the simple matter of exhaustion – and not only cognitive and moral, but physical exhaustion as well. Everyone is familiar with the pictures of a gutted Berlin in May of 1945. Much of the rest of Europe looked hardly any better when the war concluded. If we recall how reluctant Europeans were to fight again in the late 1930s, a full generation after The Great War, we can begin to imagine the mental and emotional exhaustion following the far worse Second World War, a moment at which the combined effect of both wars would also have been felt. Then there is, additionally, the question of physical capacities to consider. The former great powers of Europe, who had ruled the world for centuries, committed a mutual near political suicide from 1914 to 1945, emerging from the wars as second-rate military powers, their war machines further debilitated by the devastated economic foundations upon which they rested. Put this all together, and one can clearly see the first reason Europeans have stopped fighting: simple exhaustion from prior wars.

Second, there is the equally simple matter of learning. This is perhaps the most subtle explanation of the lot, but nevertheless among the most profound. Europeans, it may be fair to say, had not necessarily figured out the mechanics of a solution to war in 1945, but had nevertheless already shifted their political cultures heavily in the direction of a mutual and profound conviction that this could never happen again. That notion may appear intangible and tenuous as a causal factor explaining the end of war, but as constructivist analyses of international politics affirm, such shifts in public consciousness are actually highly consequential. Just as Westerners have a hugely different attitude today toward slavery or autocracy or torture than they did centuries ago, so Europeans adopted a newly-learned attitude towards military aggression. War, and nationalism, and the glorification of territorial ambition – all these had very different meanings to Europeans in 1945 than they did in 1900, and the difference was the learning that came from bitter experience.Reference Schroeder⁴

It was NATO’s first Secretary-General, Lord Ismay, who once famously remarked that the purpose of NATO was to ‘keep the Soviets out, the Americans in, and the Germans down’ (Ref. Reference Gardner5, p. 1), and this clever quip actually points nicely to the next three explanations for the Long Peace in Europe. To the extent that Europeans genuinely feared a Soviet invasion of the West, internal war between them was thus a luxury none could afford, and this defensive unity soon became manifest in the form of NATO.

The advent of the new alliance also had the additional effect of instantiating a permanent American military presence in Europe, which was welcomed by many, not only because of fears of the Soviets, but also because of still existing concerns about themselves, and their long-held patterns of violent statecraft. As Barzini aptly put it: ‘Fear was the prime motivation. Fear of Russia’s military might, fear of America’s economic might, and the Europeans’ fear of themselves. “They know anything might happen in Europe because everything has happened” ’ (Ref. Reference Hewstone6, p. 3). An American military presence was therefore welcomed by many, in part to save Europeans from themselves.

NATO was also born to deal with the German Question, the most prominent and vexing diplomatic issue in Europe since at least 1871, although as it turned out, the alliance was unnecessary as a solution to this problem. Arguably, no one has changed from the experience of war more than the Germans, who became – both at the governmental and mass behavioral levels – the most reluctant of Europeans to fight, and the most pacifist in public opinion. This alone went a long way toward solving the problem of war in Europe.

Put all of this together and one can thus see, following Lord Ismay’s dictum, that the Soviet threat, the American presence, and massive changes in the aspirations and political culture of Germany, provide us with three more explanations for Europe’s Long Peace.

A sixth factor derives from the global tectonic shift that produced wholesale decolonization, and radically altered the shape of the world. To obtain a quick sense of how big a change this was, one might consider that when the United Nations was founded in 1945, it began with 51 members. Today it has 192. Most of this near-quadrupling in size is due to decolonization. Africa alone went from a continent full of colonies to over 50 new state actors. For purposes of this analysis, however, what decolonization meant was that a major source of tension that had previously existed between European powers effectively disappeared, thus further diminishing the threat of war between the metropoles of Europe.

Another pair of related factors also help to account for why war has disappeared from the European continent. These have to do simply with the changed conditions on the ground, the changed nature of national aspirations as a result of those, and the technological factors driving both. Thus it is that territorial acquisition is today no longer a valued goal for the states of Europe, while, alternatively, the significant rise in the importance of peaceful economic competition compared with previous centuries provides an eighth explanation. These twin changes in what one might describe as the core mission of states – from grabbing land, previously, to commercial prowess instead today – both impelled European countries in the direction of more peaceful relations.

A ninth factor that probably accounts for the same outcome is the necessity of collective economic coordination. After the Second World War, Europeans found themselves competing economically with the United States, and then later also with Japan, and then later still with the other rising economies of the developing world. The implicit implication of this fact is that war between themselves was an unaffordable indulgence in such a competitive global context.

At the same time, Europe – along with the rest of the developed world – has experienced an era of unprecedented affluence in the post-war period, the events of the last year or two notwithstanding. To the extent that war has historically been driven by competition under conditions of economic scarcity, it seems likely that a tenth factor explaining its absence is this astonishing prosperity – completely unprecedented in the human experience – and leading not only to hugely improved living conditions, but also to a doubling of the very length of human life from the time of just a century or two prior.

There may be also a political explanation for the end of war in Europe, to go along with these economic ones. Political scientists have long debated the notion of a ‘democratic peace’ as a law of international relations, positing that no two democracies have ever gone to war with one another, and suggesting that this is not an accident of history but rather an empirical fact, subject to theoretical explanation.Reference Russett⁷ To the extent that this is true, then we have yet another reason why Western Europeans have not fought each other, as all the major powers there have been democracies since the Second World War, and all the other countries since at least the 1970s, and because a democratic political system is indeed a requisite to join the European Union.

This democratic peace idea represents an example of institutionalist thinking in international relations scholarship, but we can also add a 12th item to the list of causal factors, this one emanating from the realist paradigm. Both France and Britain are nuclear-weapons possessing countries, for whom, therefore, the mechanism of deterrence would apply to any potential adversary. The historical record reveals that no European country ever got remotely close to contemplating war against another after the Second World War. But if they had, they would presumably have had their policy options limited by the knowledge that such an attack could have precipitated a nuclear response from at least these two countries.

Integration and Identity

Altogether then, there are numerous and powerful alternative explanations for Europe’s Long Peace. What are scholars to make of this conundrum – this embarrassment of riches when it comes to explanatory factors? It seems doubtful that there is much that could be done in terms of disaggregating these tectonic forces from one another, parsing them in order to measure the weight of their relative impacts on the explanandum. Which had more influence on ending Europe’s propensity to war: the death of colonialism or nuclear proliferation? Widespread affluence or simple exhaustion? The American presence or the Soviet threat?

The effects of these factors fully acknowledged, there is evidence that Schuman’s integration process – the 13th potential factor – also made an impact. There are nearly 500 million people living within the European Union today, hailing from 27 member-states, and speaking 23 official and working languages. That’s impressive, but then plenty of supranational organizations exist in the world, with quite a few much larger than the EU. What’s important for purposes of this analysis is whether this is truly an autonomous and relevant polity, capable of producing causal impact. In fact, it is.

Unlike perhaps any other major supranational institution, save for the UN Security Council and the World Trade Organization, the EU is uniquely powerful among the panoply of thousands of intergovernmental organizations. As is well known, it has its own currency – one of the two or three most significant in the world. It has also largely destroyed its internal barriers, creating a massive unitary economic zone, as well as a customs union, allowing it to speak with a single voice on external trade relations. Probably less well known is the estimate of some analysts that roughly half the laws governing the life of any given EU citizen are produced in Brussels.⁸ Even if that hunch is off by a factor of 50%, clearly the EU is a serious actor.

One can observe the secondary effects of this integration at the elite level, where generations have now been born, raised, and come to power in the context of an integrated Europe. A story is told at the College of Europe, in Bruges, that nicely illustrates this effect. The College – among the first experiments in a kind of cultural integration project – was launched in 1949 as a graduate school for practitioners of public policy, precisely the sort of ‘eurocrats’ who staff high level positions within the EU today. In its earliest years, though, directly following the Second World War, so much bitterness remained from that conflict that Germans and Frenchmen sharing the same dorm rooms frequently couldn’t even manage to speak to one another (Ref. Reference Green9, p. 88). Suffice it to say that those days are now long gone, and if there were to be war today between Europeans, the leaders of those warring countries would, for the first time in history, be fighting personally well-known former colleagues rather than stereotyped and readily demonized adversaries.

Moreover, this psychological effect can also be seen at the mass behavioral level, as well. Something important has happened within Europe, with little fanfare. Quietly, incrementally, but also massively, the cognitive boundaries between member-states have been eroded – especially for the young – to be replaced by a largely unconscious but profound reconceptualization of the now hugely-broadened territorial and cultural sphere that people call home.

Former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl once said that ‘Germany is my fatherland, Europe is my future’ (Ref. Reference Howe10, p. 32). Today, the future has arrived. Today, if we were to observe a typical twenty-something European, it would not be uncommon to find a person who had studied abroad for a year during high school, done all of his/her college study at a university in another country, worked at one or more jobs somewhere beyond his/her national borders, traveled extensively around the continent, associated with numerous friends from other countries, and even dated and married people who would once have been called foreigners.

Indeed, because this has been going on for some time now – as part of a conscious effort to produce exactly the effect here described – today, not only would it be increasingly common for a young person to have had these experiences, it’s increasingly common that his or her parents would as well. This begs the very question of what is abroad, and what is home. When one thinks in terms of moving about within a European-wide psychological space – or, more profoundly still, when one does so without consciously thinking about it at all – and when one’s passport is issued by the EU, and when half of the laws governing one’s behavior are written in Brussels – is ‘abroad’ still the country next door, or do you now have to leave the continent to get there?

These questions go directly to the matter of political identity in Europe, an issue that is of the ultimate significance to the question of transcending war – in ways perhaps so fundamentally profound as to be frequently overlooked, just as fish are presumably not conscious of the water in which they swim. For, at its most basic level, the first and really only mandatory requirement for war is that there be two sides to fight each other. And what the transformation of mass identities in Europe means is that this is decreasingly possible, precisely to the extent that former Germans and Spaniards are today being replaced by Europeans, at least in terms of political, if not cultural, identities. Once there were Burgundians and Bretons. Today, politically, they are all French.Reference Weber¹¹ Something similar is now happening to Germans, Spaniards and the rest, at the European level.Reference Green⁹

This development should certainly not be overstated, for at least three reasons. The first is that it is not as widespread as it could be, and in particular there are generational and class and national differences in its manifestation. Second, it is clear that what has been done can also be undone, however remote the possibility may seem. And third, of course, one might object that nations are capable of civil wars, and therefore that a common identity is no permanent guarantee of internal peace.

With all those caveats in hand, then, is identity changing in Europe, and therefore offering an antidote to war? It does appear to be doing so, although not in traditional ways. Trying to measure European identity is a slippery proposition, but the bottom line, as best as it can be deciphered using large amounts of both quantitative and qualitative data, is that something like 15% of the population there has a strong sense of European identity, something like 35% possess a weaker but still present feeling of Europeanness, and the remaining half of the population either don’t identify as European or actively reject such an identity (Ref. Reference Green9, pp. 51–70).

Longitudinal survey measures suggest that these figures remain fairly static over time, albeit with the number of identifiers nudging higher in the last decade. Talking to younger Europeans, however, indicates otherwise, as they distinguish themselves rather emphatically from their parents, and especially their grandparents, with respect to the degree of their Europeanness, and their attitudes toward other countries and other nationals.

European identity is nothing like the nationalisms of previous centuries, either in terms of its universality, its vitality or its character. But when it comes to the question of war, the implications of this identity are nevertheless potentially profound: those who conceive of themselves as Europeans will not have an enemy to fight within Europe.

Has Europe Solved the Problem of War?

This study began by asking the question, ‘Has Europe solved the problem of war?’ From that initial question, another more precise version was specified, asking whether the integration process has been responsible for that outcome, within the boundaries of the European polity. War has indeed ceased to exist in Europe, and it has been shown that there are a plethora of good explanations for that development, including Schuman’s integration program, which was intended for precisely that purpose.

Schuman sought to make war in Europe both unthinkable and materially impossible, and that has occurred in all but the most literal sense. Perhaps, however, Schuman got his goals in the wrong order, and perhaps he even picked the wrong ones in his famous charge. An ordinary two-by-four can be used to frame one’s house, but it can also be used to bash one’s neighbor over the head. It therefore seems likely that making war materially impossible may itself likely be technologically impossible, given the ‘dual-use’ nature of many tools, including defensive weaponry.

What is necessary to truly eliminate war is to truly eliminate groups, categories, tribes and nations able to distinguish themselves as sufficiently separate and hostile as to make armed conflict between them conceivable. Such a notion may strike some as a Pollyannaish stretch of epic proportions within the context of the real world of international politics, and understandably so. But history has often argued otherwise. The place we call Germany today was, back when America was fighting its civil war, not a country but a region, populated by a variety of smaller polities – and sometimes they fought each other. Today, however, it’s virtually inconceivable that Bavaria and Saxony might fight a war against one another. Even if the two regions were miraculously somehow inclined to do so, presumably the federal government would prevent that from happening. Similarly, only 150 years ago, Virginia and Vermont were enemies in that very brutal American Civil War. Could we imagine them fighting today?

The reason that most of us could not, fundamentally, has everything to do with identity, and the effects it has had upon ontology – the shifts, that is, in the very definitions and categories of being that live in people’s hearts and minds. These shifts made organized violence between such groups nearly inconceivable, in some cases because the groups themselves have even ceased to meaningfully exist as distinct political categories. Of course there’s still a Vermont and a Virginia, but not in the sense – for most people – of their principal polity, and certainly not as a homeland for which they’d fight and die.

Europe is now considerably far down that same road. There are many powerful explanations for the Long Peace in Europe, but European integration – with the effects it has had on the cognitive architecture of those living on the continent, in short, on their identities – is one of them, and perhaps from the longer historical perspective will prove to be the most significant of all.

It may therefore be that Schuman was on to something, but perhaps got his priorities mixed up. He might instead have articulated a different goal, which the very fruit of his labors – today’s European Union – is now actually achieving: to make war in Europe not only unthinkable, but ontologically impossible. That is, to make war impossible to fight because no two separate tribes exist to do the fighting.

What Europe’s Achievement means for the World

One important question raised by these findings asks whether Europe’s achievement is exportable. Could the lessons of how peace was achieved in Europe be transported to Africa, for instance, where wars are still flaring today, or Asia, where conflicts ranging from Palestine to Iraq to Afghanistan and beyond exist in various stages of inflammation?

Of course, the first problem with this idea is that the present study hasn’t successfully identified specifically what it was that brought peace to Europe. It might have been one of the 14 factors discussed, or another, or some additive combination of them, or some additional effect arising from the interaction of two or more of them, or some other factor entirely that wasn’t on the list. The second problem is that so many of these factors were the spontaneous product of historical evolution. Decolonization, the advent of nuclear weapons, expanded affluence – these are not developments one can make happen at will, let alone for purposes of generating second-order effects. Thirdly, there are some factors one wouldn’t want to generate even assuming one could. Learning in Europe was in part the product of two catastrophically destructive wars. Would anyone recommend that other regions of the globe precipitate such conflicts in order to obtain peace afterwards?

How about regional integration, a process that was launched for the primary purpose of ending war – is it alone exportable? Real integration involves the handing over of real measures of sovereignty from member-states to a supranational authority, something that jealous national governments are almost always loath to do. In Europe’s case, it seems inconceivable that this could have transpired without the impetus of a jarringly grim international disaster preceding it, and even given this, and even given as well 60 years of work on the project, most policy competences in the realm of high politics remain to this day firmly ensconced at the national level. Indeed, they are so to such an extent that the EU absolutely completely flunked its greatest test of forging a Common Foreign and Security Policy – the case of the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

On the other hand, integration elsewhere needn’t follow precisely the same path, nor necessarily be driven by the same factors as was Europe’s process. This may be particularly the case because other regions can today avail themselves of something that the Europeans never had – namely, an existing model manifesting some significant success upon which to draw. Thus, nascent and typically more limited efforts toward integration exist in various parts of the world, including one in Africa that aspires to a scope roughly as broad as Europe’s. And despite historical circumstances that may be – and hopefully would be – far different from the ones that brought Europe to the door of regional integration, it is possible that others might follow a different process leading to the similar end-point of fostering greater levels of peace in their respective regions. In short, it’s probably fair to conclude that the model – as goal, if not process – is exportable, but that the political will to get there, the impetus that drove Europe in a direction states almost never want to go, may be quite another matter. Perhaps it requires catastrophe to open that door. But also perhaps not, if the lessons of the 20th century can be accessed by all.

In any case, whatever European integration means for the rest of the world, for Europeans – the actual real people on the ground who sometimes get lost in the machinations of academics’ studies and policymakers’ initiatives – something undeniably profound has certainly occurred.

It’s easy to lose track of the significance of this today, especially from outside of Europe, because – unless one is over 60 or 70 years old – its product has been the normal order of business, all of one’s life. But for the first time, really ever in their history, Europeans today can wake up every morning and traverse each day without the fear of armed conflicts turning their very streets into rubble, without the worry of unfathomable civilian carnage devastating their continent, and without the dread of an entire generation of young people being consumed, as one, by the flames of war.

On a continent where it was long understood that anything could happen because everything had happened, perhaps the most unexpected turn of events of all is that Europe has come to a place, by whatever means, where the one thing that no longer does happen is war – heretofore humanity’s greatest and most persistent affliction.